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Madagas Car: Famadihana: The Festival of Turning The Bones in Madagascar

The document provides information about Madagascar and its Famadihana festival. It describes the festival as a traditional ceremony where family members exhume and rewrap their ancestors' remains, dance with them, take them home and return them to the tomb after making offerings. It also lists some facts about Madagascar, such as its GDP, population growth rate and areas of natural beauty like lemur habitats and spiny forests that contain unique baobab trees.

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ShelbyMcKern
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113 views1 page

Madagas Car: Famadihana: The Festival of Turning The Bones in Madagascar

The document provides information about Madagascar and its Famadihana festival. It describes the festival as a traditional ceremony where family members exhume and rewrap their ancestors' remains, dance with them, take them home and return them to the tomb after making offerings. It also lists some facts about Madagascar, such as its GDP, population growth rate and areas of natural beauty like lemur habitats and spiny forests that contain unique baobab trees.

Uploaded by

ShelbyMcKern
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Country Statistics:
Gross Domestic Product: $22.03 billion
Life Expectancy at Birth: 65.85 years
Population Growth Rate: 2.65%
Total Area: 587,041 sq. km.
Thats just smaller than Arizona twice
over!
Famadihana: the festival of Turning
the Bones in Madagascar
Location: Hauts plateaux (highlands), Madagascar
Traditional Malagasay culture is rooted in respect for its
ancestors, as the Merina peoples Famadihana exhumation
ceremony bears testament to. The living family members
gather at the clans tomb, where stone and mud are prised
open and straw-wrapped ancestors passed out above bobbing,
dancing heads. The family lovingly re-wraps its dear
departed in special lambas (scarves) and sprays them with
perfume. Women who are having trouble conceiving take a
fragment of the
old shroud and
slip it under
their mattress.
Having labelled
the ancestral
bundles with
felt-tip pens,
the family mem-
bers sit in contemplation with the bodies in their laps. Some
line up for photos with their forefathers laid out neatly
in the foreground. The ancestors are then danced around
the tomb and returned to their resting place, along with
offerings of money, alcohol and photos of the deceased.
Unless theres a time of crisis, the ritual wont be repeated
for another seven years. This is good news for the family,
which has to pay for the huge party that builds up to the
exhumation.
Facts about Madagascar:
National Language spoken is French and Malagasy.
Lemurs only come from Madagascar, making them one of the
countries most unique features!
Madagascar is the 4th largest island in the world.
Boababs are one of the rarest trees in the world, and an
entire grove of them can be found in Madagascar.
Famadihana Festival in Madagascar
Local attractions:
-Baobab-studded Madagascar and neighbouring Comoros com-
prise the worlds only habitat of the dancing Lemur monkey.
-Ifaty is the name given to two dusty shing villages on the
coast of southwest Madagascar. Offshore, a 60-mile long coral
reef is a natural barrier to rough sea waves, creating coastal
waters that are ideal for diving, snorkeling and fshing. The
desert inland area is known for its spiny forest, where the
strange-shaped baobab trees have thrived for centuries.
The Tsingy de Bemaraha Reserve lies in the southern region
of Madagascars largest natural reserve, Tsingy de Bemar-
aha Strict Nature Reserve. The word tsingy refers to the
pinnacles that dot the parks limestone plateau. Located near
the countrys west coast, the park features a broad expanse
of mangrove forest. The park is home to seven lemur species,
including the Deckens sifaka, a genus of lemur notable for its
creamy white fur and black face.

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